ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 16, 1995 TAG: 9512190007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
JANE WOOD, a Republican state senator from Fairfax County, declared this week that she'll remain a Republican ... except she won't promise to vote with her party when the Senate organizes itself next month.
Virgil Goode, the Democratic state senator from Rocky Mount, has been keeping his own counsel ... except he skipped Senate Democrats' first caucus to elect party leaders and reportedly has told them not to count on his vote when the full Senate votes to organize.
Wood tends to be somewhat to the left of Virginia Republicans' ideological center of gravity; Goode, somewhat to the right of Virginia Democrats' ideological center. That's fine. The interests of both the parties themselves and of the body politic are served when political parties incorporate a reasonably broad spectrum of views within their ranks and avoid intolerance toward internal dissent.
But does the Wood-Goode position (or, in Goode's case, apparent position) go too far? It does raise questions:
Does a "Republican" (or a "Democratic") lawmaker who can't be relied on to vote with the Republicans (or Democrats) on the basic matter of procedural organization become thereby somehow less of a Republican or a Democrat? Is there, in other words, a minimum level of support that even a party of many views can rightfully expect from those who carry its label?
If Wood throughout her first term in the Senate was willing to vote with the Republicans on organizational matters, and Goode throughout his several terms was willing to vote with the Democrats (indeed to serve as caucus chairman), why not now? Is there something unseemly, in other words, about abandoning past loyalties simply because the Nov. 7 elections altered the Senate floor count?
If a politician intends to switch parties or become an independent, shouldn't he or she do so before rather than after an election? Is there the breaking of at least an implicit promise to the voters, in other words, when a winning candidate so quickly abandons the party on whose ticket he or she ran?
Granted, both Wood and Goode ran unopposed this year; moreover, Goode probably could be re-elected from his district if he ran on the Vegetarian ticket. Granted, too, party-switching in itself is a perfectly acceptable activity.
Even so, Wood or Goode, or both, might have been opposed if they had run under the label of the other party or as independents. Whether Goode would've won as a non-Democrat can only be surmised, not known for sure; that's what elections are for. And the issue in party-switching is timing, not party loyalty per se.
To raise such questions is not necessarily to answer them. If Wood's or Goode's intent is to encourage competing bids for personal place and prestige, then their positions amount to little more than opportunistic power grabs. But if the aim of the game is to help ensure an equitable apportioning of party power in a Senate so evenly split, then the Wood-Goode position makes principled sense.
In either case, though, party leaders in the state Senate have an avenue for making the Wood-Goode game immaterial - arrive themselves at a reasonable accommodation for party power-sharing.
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